TITLE: America’s Role Reversal: Working-Class Blacks Make Gains While Whites Fall Back
https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/income-gap-white-black-working-class-13b8a286
EXCERPTS: A big shift is under way in American life: The prospects for working-class and poor white Americans are declining, while they are improving for Black Americans in the same economic tier.
That reversal of fortunes was documented in a landmark study published earlier this year by Harvard University researchers. The change in economic mobility the researchers traced—which shrank the amount by which Black Americans’ income lags behind white Americans’ income—occurred between 2005, when many Gen Xers were in their late 20s, and 2019, when many millennials reached the same age.
Nationwide, a Black child born to parents at the 25th percentile of income in 1992 made $9,521 less at age 27 than a white child born at the 25th percentile. A Black child born in 1978 made $12,994 less at age 27, adjusted to 2023 dollars.
In Illinois, some of the forces driving such change can be seen in Madison County, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. One key is how unevenly white and Black workers reaped the rewards of industrialization in the 20th century, and how differently they responded to its decline.
Madison County was dominated for decades by heavy industry—including steel mills, oil refineries and a glass factory—that fueled thriving downtowns in the riverfront cities of Granite City and Alton. When deindustrialization took hold, those areas suffered, and jobs in other sectors grew, including in wholesale and retail trade, healthcare and professional services.
Many white workers with union positions at plants saw their jobs as core to their identities, a deep source of pride passed across generations. That made it harder to adjust when factories disappeared.
Black workers, who historically had lower-paying factory and service jobs, had comparatively little attachment to the tradition of heavy industry and more room to gain.
In Madison County, white children born to poor parents in 1992 were worse off as millennial adults than their Gen X counterparts born in 1978, with their average annual household income declining 11% to about $30,000, according to the Harvard study. Meanwhile, Black children born to poor parents in 1992 were better off as adults than their Gen X counterparts, with their average annual household income increasing 21% to about $23,000.
Looked at another way, the income gap between the two groups shrank from around $15,000 in 2005 to around $7,000 in 2019. Madison County, with a population of 263,000, is 83% white and 10% Black.
“When you have such a strong economic backbone like the steel mill for working-class white folks, that becomes something you can imagine and count on,” said Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who is researching Madison County and a county in Arkansas in collaboration with the Harvard team. “Low-income Black communities, typically not having had such strong sources of work to rely on, cultivated networks that didn’t depend on that.”
In its heyday in the mid- to late 20th century, Granite City supported large networks of suppliers and employed thousands of workers who spent their earnings in downtown shops and restaurants.
“If you worked at U.S. Steel, everyone looked up to you,” said Rob Powell, 48 and white, a steelworker like his father, great-uncle and great-grandfather. “It was like, wow…you must make that big mill money.”
The plant gave his parents, who grew up poor, a foothold in the middle class, with gift-filled Christmas celebrations and annual vacations to places like Florida, Powell said. He did a short stint in college, decided it wasn’t for him and joined the mill in 1997.
Then came the “China Shock”—the flood of cheap imports in the 2000s that disrupted industries across the U.S. Steel companies and other manufacturers in Madison County cut production, consolidated or closed.
Powell was laid off several times starting in 2008, but always returned when the plant started hiring again. He went on unemployment for some periods and landed work at a brass mill and other companies. Yet those jobs couldn’t match the pay and benefits of the mill, where in good times he earned close to six figures annually.
Powell and his wife, Adrienne Korunka, who works as a legal secretary, stopped taking vacations or going on pricey outings, and one year relied on a charity for Christmas presents. He is one of the few to remain employed at U.S. Steel, but he isn’t sure for how much longer.
The couple say they worry about their four children, ranging from 19 to 29 in age, who don’t have college degrees and have mostly languished in retail and service jobs that don’t pay much.
“Life is kind of stalled for everybody,” said Korunka, 48.
The China Shock had a different effect on Black workers, who were less represented in manufacturing jobs to begin with and were able to benefit from the growing number of jobs in other sectors, according to a 2022 paper by researchers including Lisa Kahn, an economist at the University of Rochester.
For decades, white workers with well-paying factory jobs often paved the way for relatives and friends to join. Black workers didn’t have such favorable access and connections, and those who managed to get in weren’t as eager to bring in family.
“Those parents who worked there didn’t want their kids to work there,” said Rouzell Porter, who is 57 and Black. “They wanted their kids to go to college.”
Porter said the education message was drilled into his head by many of the adults he grew up with. He was raised in the county, including for a period in public housing with his grandmother, and was the first in his family to earn a college degree. So, too, were his wife and her two siblings, whose father had worked for years at a refinery in the county.
Porter is now chairman of the 100 Black Men of America’s Southern Illinois chapter, based in Alton, which is 25% Black. The chapter got its start in the mid-1980s to mentor Black youth on academics and financial literacy. “These kids have to see successful Black men so they can see it’s attainable,” Porter said.
David Goins, 64, who was elected Alton’s first Black mayor in 2021, worked in the city’s police department for about 25 years starting in the mid-1980s. He said Black neighborhoods were tightknit, with adults watching over youth and stepping in to keep them in line.
In their study published earlier this year, the Harvard researchers, led by economist Raj Chetty, concluded that changes in mobility were driven in significant measure by the social environments in which children grew up. If the adults in their orbit were employed—and interacting with them nourished their aspirations and generated helpful connections—they fared better. In the opposite case, they did worse.
The adults didn’t necessarily have to be a child’s own parents. What was key was growing up in a neighborhood where more parents have jobs.
The share of the parents of low-income white children who were employed dropped from 66% for children born in 1978 to 55% for those born in 1992. Meanwhile, the proportion of parents of low-income Black children who were employed increased from 72% for children born in 1978 to 74% for those born in 1992.
At Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, a large four-year institution in Madison County, the proportion of Black students increased to 13% in 2022 from 10% in 2001, according to U.S. Department of Education data. The proportion of white students dropped to 66% from 82% over that period. Enrollment of Black students over that period increased 26% to 1,988, while enrollment of white students declined 19% to 12,518.
TITLE: White Americans who perceive themselves to be “last place” in the racial status hierarchy are most drawn to alt-right extremism
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-024-00154-w
EXCERPT: In the U.S., economic inequality—or the unequal distribution of financial resources across society—has reached historically high levels. In 1983, upper-income families had 3.4 times more wealth than middle-income families and 28 times more wealth than lower-income families. Yet, in 2016, these ratios have dramatically increased: upper-income families now have 7.4 times more wealth than middle-income families and 75 times more wealth than lower-income families1. Concurrent with rising inequality is rising political polarization2, and data suggest that rising economic inequality may further exacerbate political polarization3.
Economic inequality is also racialized such that more wealth is concentrated among white people than Black people. From 1983 to 2016, the median white family went from having approximately 8 times more wealth than the median Black family to 13 times more wealth4. Somewhat ironically, these wealth inequalities that benefit white people on average seem to lead many white people to feel as if they are falling behind the perceived high status of their racial group5,6. While prior work has linked these feelings of despondency among white Americans to poor health outcomes5,6, we propose that these subjective experiences of low status may also be associated with the rise of right-wing extremism7,8.
White Americans associate white people with being wealthy and Black Americans with being poor9,10. Recent work has extended these findings to investigate race/class assumptions beyond Black and white Americans11. This work, using General Social Survey data, finds a perceived racial economic hierarchy similar to Group Positional Theory: e.g.12 white Americans are perceived to be wealthiest followed by Asian Americans, then Hispanic/Latinx Americans, and finally Black Americans. Together, these findings suggest that white Americans, on average, are—and are stereotyped to be—“better off” than racially minoritized Americans.
Despite the fact that white Americans, on average, are objectively doing better economically than racially minoritized individuals13, white Americans tend to underestimate the racial wealth gap between white and Black Americans14. Likewise, white Americans increasingly report feeling that they are being “left behind”15,16 and are less optimistic about their economic future than Black Americans15. For these reasons, some have proposed that white people who feel disempowered may have played a role in the controversial election and presidency of Donald Trump—a candidate who seemed to prioritize connecting with anti-elite white Americans who otherwise felt ignored (e.g., “draining the swamp”17). These trends have led many to wonder: why are some white people feeling disempowered, and when might this feeling lead to support for right-wing political extremism?
We propose that one reason white people may feel disempowered is because high economic inequality makes race/class stereotypes salient18—stereotypes which are likely to be more extreme as inequality rises. Because white Americans, on average, stereotypically assume that white people are wealthy9,10, and because white Americans tend to compare their own SES to the perceived high status of their racial group5,6, conditions of high inequality mean that white Americans are making extreme upward comparisons, leaving them feeling as if they are “falling behind” most white people5,6.
In addition to within-group comparisons, white Americans also make between-group status comparisons. As a result, white Americans’ feelings of falling behind may be further compounded by status comparisons with people from other racial/ethnic groups. On average, racially/ethnically minoritized groups (e.g., Asian, Black, and Latinx Americans) are stereotyped as poorer than most white Americans9,10,11. However, in the current political climate, some white Americans may feel like their individual position in the economic hierarchy is challenged both by feeling they are “worse off” than other white people (i.e., feelings of exclusion) and that other racial/ethnic groups may be passing them as a result of perceived racial progress14, and/or recent social movements pushing for racial equality (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter). This perception of precarious positionality within and between groups may activate fears of being in last place (i.e., last place aversion19) and may stoke a general sense of victimization that others have argued can lead to hierarchy-enhancing efforts20,21. Further, precarious positionality between groups may give rise to feelings of social exclusion, intergroup prejudice, and political radicalization e.g.12,22,23. Therefore, for some white Americans, we expect that within- and between-racial group comparisons may produce a feeling that the current system is not working for them, and that they need a radical candidate who promises to uplift white people who have been left behind the success of their racial group24,25. Because white Americans without a college degree are more likely to feel threatened in the current economic climate15,26, we anticipate that white Americans who do not have a college degree may be particularly likely to fit this profile5,6.
TITLE: The United States in 2050 Will Be Very Different Than It Is Today
https://www.pgpf.org/programs-and-projects/convening-experts/us-2050/research-summary/
EXCERPTS: The gap between winners and losers in the labor market has been growing over time, and is increasingly the subject of public concern and academic inquiry. The drivers of this widening inequality are many — the rising power of employers and the waning power of unions, the intensifying competition from globalization, the growing demand for workers with skills and education outstripping the supply of such workers.
Today about 10 percent of U.S. adults hold two-year college degrees and just over a third hold four-year degrees. Whites and Asian Americans are more likely to have bachelor’s degrees than blacks or Hispanics. Since 2000 a growing share of adults in each group has earned a four-year degree. Starting with projections of slower population growth and an increasing share of the population that is non-white, Harry Holzer of Georgetown University looks ahead to 2050 and sees a more slowly growing labor force that is likely to be no better educated than today’s.
By 2050, the Census Bureau projects the number of non-Hispanic whites will be falling, the number of African Americans will have grown by roughly 30 percent, the number of Hispanics by 60 percent and the number of Asian Americans will have more than doubled.
Immigrants and their children account for 26 percent of the U.S. population today; by 2050 that’ll be 34 percent, Pew projects. That, of course, depends on what happens to U.S. immigration policy between now and then. Without continued immigration, the U.S. population will barely be growing at all in 2050 as the number of births roughly equals the number of deaths.
Immigration has been an important driver of population growth since the rewrite of the nation’s immigration laws in 1965, both because of the climbing number of immigrants and because immigrants’ fertility is higher, on average, than the fertility of native-born women. Immigrants comprise about 14 percent of the U.S. population today versus 5 percent in 1965; Pew Research Center attributes 55 percent of the U.S. population growth since 1965 to immigrants, their children and grandchildren. Over the past half century, the origins of immigrants to the U.S. has changed: fewer have been European whites; more have been Hispanic or, increasingly, Asian. Although there are still many more people living in the U.S. who were born in Mexico than were born in China and India combined, Pew says the annual flow of new immigrants from Asia surpassed that of Hispanics in 2009.
The changing composition of the flow of immigrants to the U.S. reflects, in part, the different economic conditions in their home countries, but Jennifer Sciubba of Rhodes College argues that changes in U.S. immigration policies are a more important factor. Immigration from India and China picked up in the 1990s because the H1-B visa program provided an entry ramp for high-skilled foreigners. Immigration from Mexico slowed between 2000 and 2007, partly because enforcement and monitoring at the border intensified after 9/11. Still, immigration from Mexico tends to go up when the economy there is worse than it is here and tends to fall when the U.S. economy sags, as when the mid-2000s housing bust reduced demand for construction workers.
Most immigrants come to the U.S. in search of a better life, but the effect of immigration on workers who are already here remains the subject of much public — and some academic — controversy. Vasil Yasenov of the University of California at Berkeley documents that, since 2000, immigrants have tended to be either low-wage, less-skilled workers or high-wage, higher-skill workers with relatively few immigrants in the middle. He finds that while immigration slightly reduces the wages of low-wage workers who are already here, it slightly increases the wages of higher-income workers because higher-skill immigrants complement, rather than substitute for, higher-skill workers who are already here. He concludes that immigration has not had a big role in the increase in income inequality in the U.S. though it may have widened the gap between the very bottom and the very top.
SEE ALSO:
What does it actually mean when we talk about the American ‘working class’?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/03/american-working-class
John Lennon and the song that highlighted the “real hypocrisy” of songwriting
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/john-lennon-and-the-song-that-highlighted-the-real-hypocrisy-of-songwriting/